I have been building websites and blogging for the last 5+ years using self-hosted WordPress sites. This approach worked well for what I was doing, including building my own personal website. At the same time I felt—as a former coder and someone in the technology industry—I should probably be coding my own website. It almost felt inauthentic.
Some background
I started my career as a software developer and thrived in that role for a number of years, ultimately working my way up to solution architecture and technical leadership. Unfortunately, as you progress in your career you often tend to drift further from the code. Over the years I’ve continued to dabble, learning some of the new frameworks and building some simple capabilities. However, I found myself growing more interested in committing more time to the craft.
Using Gatsby to blog
So I decided to combine two of my passions into one—blogging and coding. At that moment I committed to developing my personal website using the relatively new static site generator Gatsby. I thoroughly enjoyed using the web framework and learning its intricacies. It introduced me to GraphQL which I found quite flexible and useful. I ultimately hosted the code in my public GitHub repo and wired the CI/CD to publish to Netlify whenever I posted a new markdown-based blog post. Life was good.
What went wrong
As time progressed, and I didn’t blog as much, I tended to neglect the project. Given the constant churn of frameworks and plugins and my lack of upkeep, when I did decide to write a blog post I would spend the first hour debugging configuration and build issues. By the time I had the development instance back up and functional, I had lost the desire to write anything. This cyclic approach worked ok for awhile but recently I decided to pull the plug on the experiment.
The turning point
Just the other day I wanted to write a blog post. I opened up VSCode and optimistically ran gatsby develop from the command line to make sure everything was still stable. Of course I was welcomed by error after error. During debugging I noticed that Gatsby had moved from v2 to v3 so I decided to go all out and just update the whole damn thing. Probably a bad decision but probably necessary at the same time. Many of my versions were way out of date and the project needed a fair amount of clean up.
I was up for the fight for awhile but after a number of errors had been resolved I sat back and thought, “why am I doing this?” I just wanted to write a blog post. I shouldn’t have my creative juices sapped by screwing around with node versions, webpack issues, plugin dependency errors, and any syntactical changes implemented in the migration to Gatsby v3. It was at that moment that I figured out that these two activities can be—and should be—separated.
Why WordPress over Gatsby for blogging
Writing involves a creative immersion. You have an idea and want to throw content onto a nice blank screen. Coding (really debugging in this case) requires an analytical and problem-solving mind that involves a back and forth battle between you and your computer. These concepts were at odds with each other. How could I ever just sit down and write if I constantly had to battle with my computer? To me, coding is art. It’s one of the most creative things you can do but laboring over configuration and build errors is not.
So, I decided to separate the two. I came to terms with any feelings of imposter syndrome and switched back to WordPress to serve as a simple content management system for my writing. My coding would be focused on building unique functional capabilities or applications. This is my first blog post since I made the switch and it was quite refreshing to just sit down and write.